However, what seems to have escaped attention is the remarkable parallels between his reactionary politics and that of National Socialism. For a start, Bernardi should be understood as the aggressively ultra-reactionary wing of militant Catholicism. It is hard to ignore the fact that leading fascists such Franco, Mussolini, Hitler and Francis de Groot were all Catholics. Likewise, the fascist Croatian Ustaša and the Slovak People’s Party were both militantly Catholic.

Most notable in this regard is the usurpation of the term “revolution” to mean something harshly and angrily reactionary. However, this is a tactic that the political right have been adopting for a long time. For example, the idea that monarchs rule for the general good of the “people” arose in reaction to the democratic movements of the nineteenth century. This process of usurpation has continued since then, most prominently in the National “Socialist” movement but in other reactionary political movements since then. Richard J. Evans said it well in The Coming of the Third Reich:

Nazism was in some ways an extreme counter-ideology to socialism, borrowing much of its rhetoric in the process, from its self-image as a movement rather than a party…

Amongst the terms borrowed from the political left included “socialism” as well as “revolution”. The following comes from Mein Kampf (my own translation from the Eher Verlag edition):

P227: Thus we came up with the name “Social Revolutionary Party”; this because the social outlook of the new establishment in fact signified a revolution

“Social Revolutionary Party” was the original name for what later came to be known as the National Socialist Party. In both cases, the term “revolutionary” or “socialist” meant something totally different to its original meaning. The term “socialist” here takes on the implications of a coarse “populist” movement driven by xenophobia: “we don’t want no wogs.” Or in modern Australian terms “turn back the boats” and help keep Australian white.

Elsewhere in Mein Kampf, Adolf Hitler says that:

P285: Revolutionary new movements hate the old forms all the more that they of little worth

The National Socialist movement is thus a “new” form of revolutionary movement that hates the “old” forms. In other words, it represents a “Conservative Revolution,” to use Cori Bernardi’s words.

P286: The meaning and purpose of revolutions is then not to tear down the whole building, but difficult to remove what does not conform or inappropriate, and thereby once again expose healthy body further and to grow.

These “revolutionary” words could all fit beautifully in Cori Bernardi’s book. In similar vein, Bernardi’s denunciation of homosexuality recalls their persecution by the National Socialist regime. Around 50 000 gay men were imprisoned in concentrations camps, where they forced to wear pink triangles on their prison uniforms, and between 5000-15000 died:

There is even a memorial for the homosexual victims at Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp.

It is simply extraordinary to what extend history has been forgotten. Those who are ignorant of history are doomed to repeated it.

I mentioned in my last blog entry something about the New Guard. I thought I should write an explanatory note to clarify who they were.

In the 1930s, all countries had their fascist movements. In the UK, there was the British Union of Fascists founded by Sir Oswald Mosley:

The appeal of fascism was that it was a staunchly anti-communist movement in the face of a perceived threat of a communist international revolution. The idea was that communism was such a threat that anything —no matter how brutal or ruthless—was justified to stop it. This is why the German version of fascism is called National Socialism, a nationalist-populist movement to oppose it to international socialism, which was communism—an alleged conspiracy of “international Jewry” to take over the world. National Socialism was thus the supposed true voice of the people (Volk), driven by a militantly patriotic nationalistic fervour and populist bogan hatred of all that was “un-German” (undeutsch). Instead of chanting “Aussie! Aussie! Aussie! Oi Oi Oi!” it chanted “Deutschland, Deutschland über alles”.

The fascist movement of Australia was represented by the New Guard. At their height, they counted up to 50 000 card carrying members with more than double that in supporters. Amongst their supporters they included the aviator Sir Charles Kingsford Smith. Here is the leader, Eric Campbell at a New Guard rally doing the fascist salute in 1932 (probably in the Sydney Town Hall):

The most dramatic incident in Australia involving the New Guard was at the opening of the Sydney Harbour Bridge. Jack Lang, the Labor Premier of New South Wales had deliberately shunned inviting royalty or even the monarch’s representative, the Governor General, instead choosing to cut the ceremonial ribbons himself. This outraged the reactionary political right. Before Jack Lang could cut the ribbons to declare the bridge open, Colonel Francis de Groot, a member of the New Guard appeared on horseback brandishing a sabre with which he slashed the ceremonial ribbons before Jack Lang:

The interesting thing about Francis de Groot was that, despite his name, he was born in Dublin, Ireland. He was Catholic, just like Tony Abbott. And, like Tony Abbott, he was fanatically monarchist.

As a reader of German, I follow the German media, along with other international media. I find it interesting that the fact that fascists managed to take over the country and lead it to utter ruin means that ex-fascists have all either been hanged, imprisoned, outlawed or gone underground out of fear and shame. Ultra-right parties are banned by law there. The end result is that anything that even remotely smacks of the resurgence of the far-right would be immediately shunned or come under police scrutiny. The slogan “turn back the boats” would be impossible because many boats carrying Jewish refugees did indeed have their boats “turned back” and told to “go back to where you came from”. Likewise, the old nationalistic term “un-German” cannot be used without people being horrified. Not so with Australians, it seems, who have never been afforded a similar opportunity to get fascism out of their systems and where the word “un-Australian” has taken on a frightfully belligerent populist appeal. Today, the descendants of the New Guard look like they might have successfully managed to infiltrate the Liberal Party in pushing it to the extreme right of politics.

Nor would any German political party ever be able to publicly campaign on the basis of a promise to “stop the boats” repeated as a belligerent campaign slogan over and over again without coming under universal condemnation. The fact that Australia has never been ruled by a fascist dictatorship in the past is hardly an excuse for permitting this sort of thing to pass muster here. In fact, the National Socialists were pioneers of the technique used by Tony Abbott and fellow members of the Liberal Party who all unrelentingly repeated the “stop the boats” slogan “a thousand fold”:

Now the purpose of propaganda is not continually to produce interesting changes for the few blasé little masters, but to convince; that is, to convince the masses. The masses, however, with their inertia, always need a certain time before they are ready even to notice a thing, and they will lend their memories only to the thousand fold repetition of the most simple ideas.

Nor does the mere fact that the far-right today dissociate themselves from the catastrophic failure represented by Hitler and National Socialism—understandably refusing to allow themselves to even be called by the now dated and pejorative term “fascist”—change the fact that it is just old wine rebranded into new bottles. Perhaps, we must all just resign ourselves to the fact that Australians simply have to be given a chance to get fascism “out of their systems” just like the Germans.

In the entire history of American politics there has only been one Catholic president and that was John F. Kennedy. When Kennedy arose to become the Democrat nominee for presidential office, he came under immense suspicion from Protestant America, and was forced to make a public speech supporting the separation of church and state. The fear was that Kennedy would be little more than a Vatican puppet and America would come to be ruled by the Pope. Here is Kennedy’s famous Houston speech:

The great oddity is that in the case of Australia, no such questions have ever been asked of Tony Abbott, who was not merely born into Catholicism like Kennedy, but went so far as to actively train for the Roman Catholic priesthood. It is doubtful that anyone who had trained for Catholic priesthood would ever get elected as president in the US. To quote the Sydney Morning Herald:

Tony Abbott was recently quoted as saying that Pell was “a person of significance and influence” in his life. “Occasionally, he will ring me with a thought,” the politician continued. “Occasionally, I will ring him to ask if we could catch up. Once or twice I’ve sought his counsel on important matters where I thought he would have insight and wisdom I didn’t think others would likely have.” Pell tells me he and Abbott have been friends for years. “I admire him as a very decent and competent fellow,” the cardinal says…. Pell and Abbott have a special bond. Both were close to the late anti-communist Catholic political activist B. A. Santamaria…[A]nother Pell-watcher, author Thomas Keneally, says, “I rather fear the alliance between [Pell] and Abbott, who is in a way the disciple.”

Never has anyone demanded of Abbott to publicly profess his support for the separation of church and state, to ensure that the capital of Australia has not been surreptitiously transferred to the Vatican. It is clear that this is important unless Australia is to become a theocracy, since already, the climate change policy of the Liberal Party, which under John Howard and Malcolm Turnbull supported carbon pricing, has taken on an astonishingly similarity to those of Cardinal Pell, unofficial head of the Catholic Church in Australia:

Recently Robert Manne, following fashionable opinion, wrote that “the science is truly settled” on the fundamental theory of climate change: global warming is happening; it is primarily caused by the emission of greenhouse gases, especially carbon dioxide and it is certain to have profound effects in the future.

These fundamentals are distinct, he acknowledges, from scores of other different questions. The author is secure in these fundamentals, dismayed and embarrassed by those who cannot make these distinctions especially as “the future of the Earth and of humanity are at stake.” Opponents are accused of “ideological prejudice and intellectual muddle.”

His appeal is to the “consensual view among qualified scientists.” This is a category error, scientifically and philosophically. In fact, it is also a cop-out, a way of avoiding the basic issues.

What is important and what needs to be examined by lay people as well as scientists is the evidence and argumentation which are adduced to back any consensus. The basic issue is not whether the science is settled but whether the evidence and explanations are adequate in that paradigm.

The complacent appeal to scientific consensus is simply one more appeal to authority, quite inappropriate in science or philosophy. Thomas Aquinas pointed this out long ago explaining that “the argument from authority based on human reason” is the weakest form of argument, always liable to logical refutation.

Pell sums his position up by stating the anthropogenic climate change is the “mythology” (sic) of the Godless:

The immense financial costs true-believers would impose on economies can be compared with the sacrifices offered traditionally in religion, and the sale of carbon credits with the pre-Reformation practice of selling indulgences. Some of those campaigning to save the planet are not merely zealous but zealots. … To the religionless and spiritually rootless, mythology – whether comforting or discomforting – can be magnetically, even pathologically, attractive.

In other words, climate change is the Faith of the Godless and only the Godless could believe in such heretical “mythology”. True Catholic Faithful must believe in God and the Pope instead of climate change scientists. Little wonder the Catholics in the Liberal Party today are trying so hard to save their souls by eliminating carbon pricing. They are understandably more worried about exposure to excessive “heat” in the eternal afterlife:

‘An Angel Leading a Soul into Hell’ by a follower of Hieronymus Bosch, 16th century

This raises the simple question as to whether the climate change policy of Australia is being dictated by the Catholic Church rather than by either science or democracy. Cardinal Pell clearly has direct access to the prime ministerial ear, and it is Pell and the Catholic Church—not the people of Australia—who influences Abbott first and foremost. To add to the suspicion, the current cabinet is loaded with private school Catholics:

Whereas only 25% of Australians identify as Catholic, a dramatic 47% of members of cabinet are Catholic. That is a simply extraordinary statistic—one impossible to dismiss as mere coincidence.

This is not the first time in history that a politicised version of reactionary Catholicism has driven the agenda of the political extreme right. Indeed, Hitler himself was Catholic, as were Mussolini, Franco and the Croatian fascist Ustaše. I quote from The Oxford Handbook of Fascism:

The first fascist movement to come to power, Italian fascism, did so in a country that was 99 per cent Catholic and the seat of the papacy, and ‘clerical fascist’ movements came to power in another two overwhelmingly Catholic countries, the first Slovak Republic and the Croatian Independent State. Fascist movements and regimes in other European countries also entered into relations with the Roman Catholic Church, and in broader terms, many Catholics, individually and collectively, were closely involved with fascist movements and regimes in the inter-war years.

Adolf Hitler to General Gerhard Engel, 1941: “I am now as before a Catholic and will always remain so.”

This is not to suggest anything so hysterical to the effect that the Liberal Party is now the Australian Nazi Party or that Tony Abbott is Hitler—that would be nothing more than childish mudslinging. Nor am I suggesting that the Catholic Church is necessarily a fascist institute. The catastrophe that the NSDAP engendered was the structural product of a whole series of historical events that coincided, including WWI, the Great Depression, the Treaty of Versailles, a series of catastrophic defeats on the Eastern front etc. Without the supportive set of structural circumstances, ideology alone is probably insufficient to precipitate such an extreme phenomenon. In any case, nearly all but a tiny minority of far-right parties staunchly dissociate themselves from National Socialism, which they almost universally vehemently denounce.

However, the Australian Liberal Party today have lurched far to the right of other mainstream centre-right parties around the world e.g. the British Conservative Party, the National Party of New Zealand, the German Christian Democrats, the French UMP, the Liberal Democratic Party of Japan, and arguably even the Republican Party in the US. The immigration policy of the Liberal Party more resembles that of the far-right British National Party than that of the British Conservatives. Likewise, the ultra right French Front National’s policies echo those of the Australian Liberals. The sort of immigration policies pushed by the Liberal government earned them the rightful admiration of Anders Breivik.

The criticism of the Liberals for having swung far to the right, to a position even more right-wing than even that of John Howard, is something that even former Liberal Prime Minister, Malcolm Fraser, finds extremely objectionable. The Liberal Party of Australia was never meant to be a far right Catholic reactionary movement, but today it finds itself straying away from classical moderate liberal conservatism towards the enactment of an irrational ideologically driven reactionary agenda reminiscent of the New Guard. Indeed, the Liberal Party today finds itself hardly more “liberal” than the National Socialists were “socialist”.

The following picture, based on The Pillars of Society (1926) by George Grosz, is an entirely humorous parody of the parallels between the politics of the Weimar Republic, and contemporary Australia. For those of you interested in the details of the background to the painting and its parallels to contemporary Australian politics, please see the previous blog entry (or perhaps two).

I suspect I have put Cardinal Pell in the wrong frock and headgear for his rank and denomination. As to more details about the attitudes of Grosz towards the relationship between the political right and religion, the following illustration says everything:

Today we will look at the constitution of the Weimar Reichstag elected parliament after the November, 1932 elections:

National Socialists (NSDAP): 230 seats, 37.27% of votes

Social Democrats (SPD):133 seats, 21.58%

Communist Party (KPD): 89 seats, 14.32%

German Centrist Party (Zentrum): 75 seats, 12.44%

German National People’s Party (DNVP): 37 seats, 5.91%

From left: NSDAP, NSDAP, Zentrum, SPD, KPD, DNVP

Imagine having to vote in that election. Although the SPD today are a centre-left party, the equivalent of the Labor Party, in those days many of its major leaders were much more strongly influenced by Marx, even if they still believed in democracy and did not espouse revolution to set up a Soviet style Dictatorship of the Proletariat, like the KPD did. If you were not left wing, and staunchly anti-“Commie”, then the only viable right-wing party meaningfully large enough that you could hope it would stop your country turning into a Soviet style Communist Republic was the NSDAP. Prior to the rise of the NSDAP, the DNVP was emerging as a centre-right party capable of being a major political force. Previously the centre-right had been convincingly lead by Gustav Stresemann (of the DVP), but after Stresemann’s untimely death, the centre-right gradually shrunk to oblivion. Industrialists and bankers who once supported the centre-right put their money behind the NSDAP instead. In the 1932 elections, the DNVP won only 5.9% of the vote. In other words, voting for the NSDAP became just like voting for the Liberal Party in the Australian elections.

However, there is another interesting statistic lurking in there. The political right remained reasonably united and cohesive around the NSDAP. The other smaller parties in the Reichstag like the Catholic Centrists and the DNVP were centre right parties (forerunners of Angela Merkel’s CDU), and would be more inclined to enter into a coalition with the NSDAP—after all they were considered by the Christian Right to be the lesser evil compared to the “Godless Commies”. On the other hand, the political left was far more deeply divided. Left-wing voters were unusually strongly divided between the SPD and KPD. Voting for the SPD was like voting for Labor, and, I guess, that means that voting for the KPD was like voting for the Greens. If you count up the seats and you add the SPD seats to the KPD seats, that is 133 + 89 = 222. That is almost as many seats as the NSDAP won in total (230). If the SPD and KPD had formed a coalition, as many after the war criticised them for failing to do, it would have been large enough to stand up to the NSDAP, and prevent their grab at absolute power. Unfortunately, the SPD and KPD were bitterly divided and refused to even talk to one another. The KPD assumed no such coalition was necessary because capitalism was so corrupt that it would soon crumble away allowing the impending utopia to fall into their laps. Tragically, the rest is history.

There is a lesson to be learned from this. If the political left is strongly divided between two fairly large voting blocks that refuse to cooperate, or form a coalition and united front to stand up to the political right, then where the left stands divided the right will conquer. The right will utterly decimate the left. When you see the squabbling between Labor and the Greens—not to mention the infighting within Labor—then, compare it to the cohesion between the Liberals-Nationals, and you will see history repeating…

George Grosz: die Stützen der Gesellschaft (The Pillars of Society), 1926. You can see caricatures of typical Weimar Republic voters. “Sozialismus ist Arbeit” translates as “Socialism means jobs”. The man with the chamber pot on his head is probably a caricature of Alfred Hugenberg of the DNVP. The NSDAP voter wears a black band in his lapel of a retired cavalry officer, and represents the typical landed gentry that supported the right along with big business and banks.

The Australian political swing to the extreme right has occurred in exactly the same manner as that of the November 1932 Reichstag elections. Only the backdrop to the Australian elections was the Great Recession (GFC), whereas the instability and voter division in the Reichstag elections occurred on the backdrop of the Great Depression, which had hit Germany especially hard.

In Australia, racial undesirables, including Jewish Holocaust survivors, are even today called “wogs”. In Australian slang, an infectious illness is often referred to as “the wog”. Instead of saying “I have the flu” you might say “I’ve got the wog, mate”. The idea is clear: racial undesirables are a disease. In likewise fashion, Hitler liked to refer to himself as the “Robert Koch of politics”. Koch is the microbiologist who discovered the cause of tuberculosis. Hitler often bragged about being the one who discovered that the Jews were a “racial bacillus” that needed eradication, because educated Jews are traditionally liberal and progressive in their political outlook. For conservatives, political liberalism was synonymous with the Jews and they thought that the best means to eradicate progressive politics was to eliminate its root cause. Even today, Jews in the US generally vote for the Democrats. The most prominent liberal intellectuals in America such as Noam Chomsky are Jewish. Marx was likewise part Jewish as were Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht. Hitler had a point about those pesky socially progressive “wogs”.

Since the spectacular failure of the National Socialist regime as the leading anti-communist political force in the world, anything that even remotely sounds like National Socialist propaganda is toxic to the reputation of any political party. Today the art of propaganda has progressed so much that the sort of crude rhetoric the NSDAP indulged in has been replaced with a much slicker and insidious brand of “public relations”. So slick is this PR machine that it no longer even calls itself propaganda but instead has cynically rebranded itself as “public relations”. This does not change the fact that the sort of political tensions and anxieties within traditionally Christian European societies (and their ex-colonies) that bred National Socialism persist today.

Just as it would be nonsense to call the Reformation a uniquely German event, it is equally nonsense to suggest that National Socialism was a uniquely German event—even worse to suggest that it is a product of the uniquely flawed and “psychopathic” German character, a flaw that supposedly does not infect the Australian character. Like Germany, Australia is, after all, largely Protestant and ethnically Northern European. Nor is the mass shooting of liberal political enemies by Anders Breivik a uniquely Norwegian event. Today the xenophobic paranoia is no longer towards one Abrahamic religious group, the Jews, but towards another Abrahamic religious group: Muslims. Indeed, Middle Eastern people of Muslim background are also Semitic people, just like the Jews. In Hebrew you say “shalom” but in Arabic you say “salam”. Both words mean “peace”.

Today, the Liberal Party of Australia has a policy that is all about maintaining the integrity of White Australia from the “threat” of contamination by the racial bacillus, the “wog” that threatens to infect Christian Australia: “turn back the boats”. Unfortunately, to make that policy work, Australia is reliant on its closest neighbour, Indonesia, which also happens to be the most populous Muslim nation in the world. On the backdrop of the historical precedent of the longstanding ban of immigration from Indonesia to Australia during the White Australia era, Jakarta politicians understood perfectly well what the coded language of “turn back the boats” means. It is a coded message in PR language intended to speak to Australians: vote for the Liberal Party, the party that will keep the “wog” from infecting Australia. Jakarta perfectly correctly understands it for the message of ethnic intolerance towards them. The Indonesians understand all too well that the sort of xenophobic ideology held by the likes of Anders Breivik is hardly restricted to the extreme right in Australia, but, like the expression “wog” to indicate a disease, is commonplace and mainstream amongst their neighbours. Nor is there a need for the extreme right to stage violent acts of protest when the Prime Minister of the country represents their views.

Naturally, Jakarta is hardly about to tell Canberra exactly what they understood this message to mean or to accuse Australians of being Nazis. That would be way too crudely undiplomatic, and effectively meddling in Australian politics. The Australia-Indonesia relationship is not yet so bad as to degenerate to that level of blatant name calling. Instead, in response to the revelations about Australia spying on the Indonesia president, Jakarta has cut off diplomatic ties and relations. Germany did not cut off diplomatic ties with the United States over similar revelations about the US spying on them. So why has Jakarta reacted so drastically over something they probably knew was happening all along anyway? The answer can only be that this represents a symbolic rejection by Indonesians of the sort of attitudes to international ethnic relationships represented by Tony Abbott and the Liberal Party.

To many the collapse of Weimar democracy and the rise of National Socialism is the seminal event of the twentieth century. I think that is a rather Western Eurocentric view of things, but nonetheless to many the horrors of National Socialist have provided the most lingering images that symbolise all that went wrong in the twentieth century. The trouble is that the images of National Socialism are often over-dramatised to the point of seeming unreal and disconnected to our everyday lives. They are made to seem like comic book caricatures detached from every possibility of relevance today. When someone is accused of being a “Nazi” or a “Hitler” it is an almost comic book pejorative whose meaning has become detached from its actual historical context.

Here is a typical example of what one finds in pop culture today:

Unfortunately, the number of people who bother to study this period of world history in any detail seem to be few and far between. History has been totally replaced by comic-book caricature, and thereby utterly belittled and trivialised. In actuality, there is much to be learned from history, including things that are of relevance to contemporary Australian politics and society. Merely demonising National Socialism with kitsch images is totally unhelpful, because it helps make it seem totally removed from our lives and our world. Unlike what pop culture images tell us, National Socialists were neither aliens nor Satanists. They were flesh and blood like you and I.

This blog has been created firstly to examine how the events of the rise and fall of the Weimar Republic remain relevant to us today. In particular, I will be focussing on the relevance to Australian politics, but also to world politics in general. Those who remain ignorant of history are doomed to repeat it.

As for the name of the blog it is partly a tribute to the German Jena Romantic poet Novalis, a philosopher as well as a poet. Jena thought also gave rise to Hölderlin, Schelling and Hegel. Hegel, in turn was a large influence on Marx and Engels. The reader will find that my posts are imbued with the influence of German thought from Hegel to Nietzsche to Adorno.